Author Bea Fitzgerald, 28, says she benefitted from this commercial shift, selling her young adult fantasy rom-com Girl Goddess Queen at the peak of the romance boom.<\/p>\n
“That sort of space opening up is what allowed me to move into the market,” she says.<\/p>\n
Bea previously worked in publishing, and recalls seeing “a lot of books that could have been published as romance [instead] published in other literary genres because they think that it will not appeal to a certain type of audience”.<\/p>\n
The genre is nothing new, she quips, having long been “championed” by publishers such as Mills & Boon. The difference now is that young people “like things really unapologetically”.<\/p>\n
“They won’t just read a romance, they’ll go shout about it online, and then they’ll go to a romance convention, and they’ll talk to their friends about it.”<\/p>\n
While the community has grown, Bea thinks critical appraisal of the genre is still lacking.<\/p>\n
“Do we see broadsheets reviewing romance books? No. And they are just as important, literary books.”<\/p>\n
Bea believes this is both because “the good majority” of the readers are women, and simply because the stories are happy.<\/p>\n
“It goes in line with this sort of academic elitism that for something to be serious, it has to be a Shakespearean tragedy,” she says. “Whereas if it’s happy, it’s not serious, it hasn’t got literary merit. It obviously does – of course it does.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Author Bea Fitzgerald, 28, says she benefitted from this commercial shift, selling her young adult fantasy rom-com Girl…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[412,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-56812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}